AP reports: “Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, announced plans Monday to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years, outlining an ambitious strategy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster to replace atomic power with renewable energy sources.”

HARVEY WASSERMAN, http://www.solartopia.org
Wasserman edits http://nukefree.org and is author of “Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, AD 2030” (which includes an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). Wasserman said today: The future of nuclear power has taken severe blows in the wake of Fukushima, accelerating the prospects for a world based on renewable energy. Japan, Germany and Switzerland — all major players — say they will build no more commercial atomic reactors.

“Japan has long been a center of the industry. But its beleaguered prime minister has cancelled plans for a dozen or more new reactors. Japan will ‘start from scratch’ on its energy policy, with a heavy emphasis on wind and solar, in which large Japanese companies already have major investments.

“Also in the wake of large demonstrations, Switzerland says it will abandon plans for at least three new reactors.

“China, India, Russia, the United States, Great Britain and South Korea remain the core of the future potential for new reactor construction. China has apparently put many future projects on hold, pending further evaluation of what happened at Fukushima. The U.S. Congress is engulfed in a heated battle on proposed loan guarantees to underwrite new construction.

“But the pro-green decisions of the world’s third and fourth-largest economies have cast a deep shadow over the future of a ‘Peaceful Atom’ once promised to be ‘too cheap to meter.'”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167